"Commentary from P.M. Carpenter"

November 30, 2012

The New Republic's Noam Scheiber has got hold of the Romney campaign's ineffably wrongheaded "final internal polling numbers," which of course led the team into an equally ineffable dreamland of ultimate victory. Scheiber claims to have learned why the Romney camp was "so sanguine about its own polling, even though it often parted company with the publicly available data," but I don't quite see the answer.

GroupThink is an obvious one--cheering crowds lending a deceptive ring of broadbased support; internally organized smugness, in which the thundering righteousness of one's own candidate is self-evident; all those campaign staff meetings in which that heck of a job each staffer is doing is duly noted, but little else--yet GroupThink, as an answer, fails to satisfy. This particular phenomenon is generally isolated from reality, whereas the Romney camp's internal polling numbers were swimming against an unignorable stream of poundingly contrary evidence.

The real answer may be much simpler than anything found in organizational theory: Mitt Romney, the indisputably worst nominee in American presidential history, was backed by a team of indisputably total incompetents.

Doubtless you recall all the recent chatter by the Beltway's elegantly photogenic, journalistically sophisticated elite about Grover Norquist being partisan toast and Republican congressfolk capitulating to reality and John Boehner shrewdly leaking through top goons a shocking willingness to boost rates and in general a budget deal being close, oh so close, ever so doable, we're just about there.

We’re seeing two things here. One is that the negotiations aren’t going well.... The other is that Republicans are frustrated at the new Obama they’re facing: The Obama who refuses to negotiate with himself.

Maybe we could somehow force from retirement all the old Jack Germonds--the unpretty, overweight, chain-smoking, bourbon-and-branchwater veteran journalists who actually understood politics and the often diabolic personalities within it.

[Tim Geithner's] offer lacks any concessions to Republicans, most notably on the core issue of where to set tax rates for the wealthiest Americans. After two weeks of talks between the White House and aides to House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), it seemed to take Republicans by surprise.

What's wrong, boys? It's not as though you have any principled objections to coldcocking, right?

Compromise is either dead, or--and here I'll use that dreadfully idealistic word--it should be. Not permanently, of course, for that way lies contemporary conservatism's madness. But compromise should remain righteously kaput as long as Republicans insist on confusing their ethical bankruptcy with honorable necessity, like mafiosi in church.

Liberalism is back, says the NYT's always superb Timothy Egan, although this re-emergent center-left majority could prove as "tenuous" as before:

For at least a generation’s time, liberals in this country have been afraid to call themselves liberal. Was it the excesses of their creed? ... Or was it the relentless campaign by the broadcasting and publishing empires of the far right, associating liberals with tyranny, spiritual vacuity and baby killing, that drove people from the label that could not speak its name?

Given that narrow choice, I'd take the latter. American liberalism's excesses were rarely excessive. Since FDR, strengthening capitalism--not weakening it--has been liberalism's chief occupation, while attempts at genuinely equitable wealth redistribution have been virtually absent. The right's appropriation, however, of flag and deities as it simultaneously propagandized liberalism as unAmerican socialist godlessness were brilliant strokes of electoral maneuvering--rendered even more brilliant by going essentially unanswered.

What also shall remain unanswered, or unresolved, for some time is the oddest sort of paradox: Today's center-left majority may not have organically supplanted yesterday's center-right majority; it might merely have shifted the distorted center leftward, still leaving the left on the right, but the right a bit more to the middle.

Or--and here's another real possibility--much of the labeled positioning blather of left and right and center and center-left and center-right is a heaping pile of practical nonsense. Americans are immemorially pragmatic; if they must be labeled, label them that. Grasping that central concept has always been key to Obama's electoral success. Still, Egan is nervous, as am I, as we all should be:

All political moments are ephemeral. This one could vanish in the blink of a donkey’s eye.... For now, the majority of Americans have Obama’s back. But should he fail, the same majority could become something much worse — a confederacy of cynics.

Which would fuel the nihilists. That's pretty much all they've got: the fierce hope of a raging cynicism born of endless obstructionism.

Crushing that hope by somehow circumventing its barricades would, as Egan rightly speculates, cause Obama to "be remembered among the greats."

November 29, 2012

Wow. I just watched six minutes of Sean Hannity, a personal record. In them I learned that 18 months ago the Middle East was peaceful and stable under dictators but hey they were "pro-American dictators" and now under the Obama administration the region has gone to hell. I also learned there are administration officials who are quaking under all the administration's lies about the Benghazi Disaster and subsequent Cover-Up but hey they don't wish indictment on themselves so the Truth eventually will out. I learned this administration ruthlessly deceived us about the Benghazi Disaster for election purposes. I learned that the Benghazi Disaster (and subsequent Cover-Up) and the 1998 Kenyan Embassy Disaster were eerily similar in their terrorist planning, but Democratic administrations just don't get it.

I would have never believed it possible, but it's close. Mighty close. Excitingly close. I would have never believed that anyone could scribble a scapegoating piece as droolingly oblivious to reality as Jennifer Rubin's, but RedState's Erick Erickson has come close, very close.

Why did Mitt Romney meet with such unspeakable ruin on November 6? Was it that Mitt, hands down, was the godawfulest nominee in the history of American presidential politics? Or that the base's knuckles couldn't pull a lever because they were too sore from all that dragging? Was it because Iowa now guarantees, every four years, a thermonuclear mind-meld of flabbergasting far-right imbecility? Any of these? Perhaps a few hundred other valid reasons?

No. According to Mr. Erickson, "for the Republican Party evil is located on the fifth floor of 66 Canal Center Plaza, Alexandria, VA 22314," where "top party consultants waged war with conservative activists...."

And now the very same top party consultants are assessing the ruin and being "put in charge of the autopsy of the GOP’s defeat." Which is absurd, writes Erickson. How absurd? Only Erick could say it this well, with such verve, with, indeed, the very kind of electric originality which the party now so desperately needs: "This is like putting the fox in charge of the hen house."

$400 billion in entitlement cuts.... The vast majority of the savings, and perhaps all of it, will come from Medicare, through a combination of means-testing, raising the retirement age and other "efficiencies" to be named later.

I'll just say it for the record--no value judgments, no philosophical preferences, no personal likes or dislikes implied or explicit. For now, this is only an objective observation, nothing less, nothing more: Such a deal would cripple Obama's second term. It would demoralize if not lose his base and undermine if not devastate the base's potential 2014 turnout.

But, as noted, there's no need to panic. The "fiscal framework," at this point, is little more than speculation--perhaps less in the shape of a structure than of a balloon.

When the Republican House majority acts as though it has a mind — and a mandate — of its own, this is not Washington being "dysfunctional," it is the separation of powers functioning as the Founders intended.

First, the Founders never anticipated the ruthless onset and agonized, democratic distortions of House-district gerrymandering for partisan gain or perpetual protection. For that matter--second--the Founders somewhat anticipated yet altogether loathed the rise of organized political parties (or what the Founders regarded as insidious "factions"). Third, perhaps more than anything else the Founders emphasized the indispensable importance of an informed, educated electorate led by enlightened and honorable men. Fourth--and this is strongly related to numbers two and three--the Founders dreaded the practical consequences of raving demagogues, who would prey--especially and more easily in circumscribed House districts--on the nation's most ignorant. And fifth, the Founders certainly never foresaw a U.S. House brimming with virtually psychotic, nihilistic, hostage-taking ideologues.

Other than that, Mr. Will, your delicate abstraction is a nice one. Very nice. Good boy.

Oh this is classic. Jennifer Rubin assails Stuart Stevens--her man's former chief strategist--for his parting op-ed in which he "[refuses] to acknowledge real and material incompetence by himself and others on the [Romney] campaign."

You read that right. Rubin--yes, Rubin, yes, Jennifer Rubin, that Rubin, the Romney-triumphalist Rubin who blindly trumpeted every word, every step, every appearance, every speech, every debate, every awful minute of her candidate's prodigiously wretched campaign--is assailing Stevens for possessing inadequate self-assessment skills.

It would be fitting, and certainly less grating, if Stevens included some real acknowledgment that the narrow loss is, in large part, attributable to the errors (we now know) he and his fellow, well-paid advisers made.

That assault, notwithstanding that Ms. Rubin for months hailed Mitt Romney as a masterful CEO with a peerless history of brilliantly analyzing any organizational defects--whether corporate or state--and single-handedly repairing them, pronto. The ultimate technocrat, the consummate fixer, the veni and vidi and vici of American leadership. That was Mitt, according to Jennifer.

Now, Mitt Romney's a victim--he was merely a helpless cog in the uncomprehending machinery of Stuart Stevens' grinding incompetence.

November 28, 2012

God bless Republican Rep. Pete Sessions, who said, in negative response to Republican Rep. Tom Cole's suggestion of a little GOP sanity at the precipice: "The president’s solidified his position, and we have, too"--the "we" being crazier than ever, thus making it even easier for the president to just sit and wait for the new year.

Republicans have another chance to demonstrate that they're Americans first and petty, malicious rogues second, and naturally they're squandering that chance. The manifest fanaticism of Republicans on everything from prudent fiscal measures as confiscatory socialism to Rhodes-scholar ambassadors as treasonous nincompoops to accessible healthcare as Big Brother tyranny are merely the more prominent symptoms of a party gone hopelessly mad.

Really. They've reached a point of political psychosis. One single, senior House member--Cole--responsibly recommends one singularly responsible act--immediate passage of the Senate's middle-class tax breaks--and the party's speaker objects that "it’s not the right approach" and another House GOPer calls it "absurd" and another says it's the House's Tom Coles "who were here causing all the problems we are facing" and yet another protests that Cole's simple sanity fails to "[reflect] the attitude of the [Republican] conference." Amen.

A disconnect, a self-deportation from reality, a wholesale disdain if not demented unawareness of this month's earlier verdict--in short, a seemingly untreatable, political psychosis. Their words and their actions make them at best irrelevant and, God bless him, Pete Sessions has just made it official.

*Potato chips rarely, if ever, face trade-offs between trying to please the individual who bought them, their constituents, and the country at large. They can just simply be oh-so-tasty.

*Anyone in the United States is allowed to buy potato chips, not just citizens. Indeed, even children and foreigners can purchase potato chips.

*Potato chips are accessible to all citizens, rich and poor alike (with the possible exception of people dealing with cholesterol issues).

*Sheldon Adelson doesn’t purchase $15 million worth of potato chips for his own personal use (at least I hope not).

***

We might add that Sheldon Adelson's mere threat to purchase $15 million worth of potato chips within, say, some particular House district won't influence or dictate the voting behavior of that district's representative.

What struck me upon seeing Chait's column title, "Grover Norquist Is Dead; Norquistism Lives On," was the profound constancy of the headline's secondary content. Grover himself is expendable; that much is vividly apparent--but Norquistism I doubt we'll ever purge, since it's in our national blood.

I have long suspected that what actually defined the much-vaunted American character was not, as is usually reported, a bunch of white Europeans fleeing religious oppression. After all, most simply turned and oppressed the next generation of American colonists. No, what defined the American character came much later: the colonists' rather rude refusal to help their king reduce his bloody debt from years of war to protect, in large part, the colonies. The mother country tended to find such refusal both shocking and incomprehensible, while the smug and now imminently safe colonists thought the entire matter of fresh taxes a royal and supremely unnecessary pain in the ass.

Americans' post-French and Indian War philosophy was essentially that of Norquistism. Colonists wanted all the benefits of big government, but not the price tag, thank you. So what else is new?

Greg Sargent relates that subsequent to a White House meeting the word from left-leaning pressure groups is: "[WH officials] expect taxes to go up on the wealthy and to protect Medicare and Medicaid benefits. They feel confident that they don’t have to compromise" (italics mine).

It might be helpful to recall that two of American history's greatest compromisers--Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt--were also, in the principled end, two of American history's greatest immovable objects.

The lesson to be learned from Spielberg's "Lincoln," as virtually every reviewer has emphasized ad nauseam, is that of the 16th president's extraordinary capacity for difficult compromise. And that of course is true enough. Yet there's another lesson--or straightforward fact of history, if one prefers--that runs just underneath the film's surface message and should not be overlooked: Lincoln was hellbent on militarily clobbering the South into total submission; there would be no eleventh-hour, life-saving, peace-securing "deal" suggesting anything but the Confederacy's unmitigated defeat. On that, Lincoln simply would not budge.

Similarly, Roosevelt--whose New Deal programs were marbled monuments to faction-infuriating compromise--shocked the Allied leadership and more than a few of its generals with his 1943 demand for the Axis Powers' "unconditional surrender." No talks, no negotiations, no deal, which, by shortening the war's duration, might well have saved millions of lives. Roosevelt, though, stood on pure principle--and history has judged him correct.

I've taken some tee-heeing criticism in the past for comparing Obama's presidential style and potential greatness to those of Lincoln and Roosevelt. Perhaps some of the criticism is justified. We can't yet know. But, should we reverse the Clausewitzian maxim--so that politics is but an extension of war by other means--we're about to find out.

November 27, 2012

These adjoining passages, from the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, are truly astounding:

The one thing Republicans shouldn't do is join the media and Democratic chorus that Mr. Norquist and his pledge are the root of our political and economic woes. The real problems are a political class that won't control its spending and economic policies that are retarding growth....

Mr. Norquist's tax pledge has been one of the few restraints over the years against those bad Beltway appetites.

One: It is Republicans who protest that high deficits crowd out private investment. Yet for years, especially throughout W.'s administration, tax policies were put in place by Republicans that guaranteed exceptionally high deficits.

Two: We weren't aware of an anti-Republican chorus which laments Norquist as the actual "root" of our woes. He is, though, one of the many poisonous byproducts of Republican ideology--as researched, developed and spewed for years by propagandistic organs such as the WSJ's editorial page.

Three: Where was Mr. Norquist as George W. Bush, while sitting atop his "political class," was cranking up spending by the trillions?

Four: Do present, debilitating "economic policies" include such items as President Obama's 18 small-business tax cuts? Or payroll tax holidays? Or middle-class cuts?

Five: Supply-side economics has proven indisputably, empirically disastrous over the last three decades; it has "retarded growth," stagnated wages, exploded the national debt and vastly increased the horrific gaps in wealth inequality, which double back to retard growth. So why must we wait--and wait, and wait--for a WSJ editorial denouncing all things supply-sided?

Other than that, dear WSJ editors, your opinions are highly valued. We look forward to your next contribution to the philosophical art of staggering self-contradiction.

McCain and Graham appeared to temper their criticism of Rice over the weekend, but the hour-and-a-half long meeting Tuesday only seemed to reignite their fury.

My guess? Susan Rice baited them. She entered this morning's meeting on an aggressive, combative footing and never relented. Expecting little but obedient back-shuffling from a mere U.N. ambassador, nothing would steam the august good old boys of John McCain and Lindsey Graham more than a young black woman's suggestion that these two almighty U.S. senators simply shove and then privately store their raving paranoia in an unlit, malodorous place.

p.s.: I suppose in this increasingly bizarre case I should add what seems like the obvious, which I'm generally loathe to do.

By now, the White House must be loving this. There appear to be sufficient votes in the Senate to confirm Rice as secretary of state; meanwhile McCain and Graham (and Ayotte) are only further contaminating the GOP brand. Hence the longer they embarrass themselves, the stronger the WH's position becomes. In short, Rice had good reason for doing what I suspect she did.

The remarkable ability of conservatives to drag American politics to the Right by taking extremist positions and then offering to "compromise" by accepting policies deemed conservative the week before last is hardly a new thing.... But the MSM keeps taking the bait, which is why we now have Lindsay Graham and Saxby Chambliss being lionized for making fake concessions to stop America from plunging over a fake "fiscal cliff," asking only the small concession that the Bush tax cuts, the principal cause of current long-term public debt, be extended forever, and oh, by the way, could we also cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits?

Republicans must be beside themselves with wonder at their own dazzling bullshit, but particularly at how the media just keep buying it.

Imagine a fellow who sees a therapist for 10 years, once a week, week in and week out, and throughout those 520 weeks he's told by the therapist that his chief problem is poor communication with his wife and kids. Then imagine that on the 521st week this fellow enters his therapist's office and exclaims: "I had a magnificent revelation last night; I think my chief problem is poor communication with the wife and kids."

Imagine that, and you've essentially grasped Ramesh Ponnuru's "insight" in his latest NRO column, "The Party's Problem," which is a stunning, jaw-dropping and indeed jarring demonstration of perpetual obtuseness. It has of late come within Mr. Ponnuru's notice, you see, that the Republican Party is now losing because for some time it has been ignoring the "economic interests" of the middle class.

Well fucking duh!

Ponnuru's revelation goes on at some length. Earlier I recommended that you read Bruce Bartlett's lengthy essay, since in it, there's something to be learned. On Ponnuru, however, don't waste your time, unless you want a cheap laugh. But should you choose the latter, here's a little something to spike your amusement: Just remember, Ponnuru is one of the brighter bulbs among the endlessly advertised pack of "young, innovative conservative thinkers."

In a grim, elegiac, must-read essay written for The American Conservative, Bruce Bartlett universalizes movement conservatism's catastrophic decline by relating his early experiences within it; then, his experiences on its wary edges; then, on its paranoid periphery; and finally, now, utterly outside of it, in forced exile. It's a riveting, historical synopsis of what should bluntly be called American intellectual fascism, which is why I despair of any "reform" of it. Unmeditative goons, sworn ideologues and ruthless enforcers don't tend to the epiphanic.

Bartlett at least partially shares my prognosis: "I am disinclined," he writes, "to think that Republicans are yet ready for a serious questioning of their philosophy or strategy." (Hence the horror of attempting to negotiate a budget deal with these throwbacks; their sinister strategies are always piously veiled and their philosophy is as corrupt as it is electorally repudiated. So screw 'em.)

Bartlett's political maturity went to full throttle when he began to appreciate George W. Bush's immutable "stupidity, cockiness, arrogance, ignorance, and general cluelessness" as president. That would do it--especially since his "conservative" friends, rather than appreciating same, went to full W.-defense mode. They simply closed the door to any objective analysis of contemporary conservatism's chronic degeneration.

Later, Bartlett "came to the annoying conclusion that Keynes had been 100 percent right in the 1930s"--and beyond. Thus Bartlett also had to cut his intellectual allegiance to the magical thinking of supply-side theory. His "final line ... to cross in complete alienation from the right," though? "[M]y recognition that Obama is not a leftist":

In fact, he’s barely a liberal—and only because the political spectrum has moved so far to the right that moderate Republicans from the past are now considered hardcore leftists by right-wing standards today. Viewed in historical context, I see Obama as actually being on the center-right.

At this point, I lost every last friend I had on the right.

Not much, as they say, of a loss.

Bartlett protests that he's "not a liberal or a Democrat," which is peculiar for anyone who's in thorough accord with Keynesian economics, detests modern Republicans, and, most of all, seems to broadly endorse Obama's Democratic conservative progressivism. But, whatever. I've come to accept such Bartlett-like protests as a shrewd marketing tool--a kind of politico-philosophical "positioning" that draws readers' attention which wouldn't otherwise exist, were Bartlett et al. to simply confess their rather conspicuous conversion.

But, I'll end where I started. Bartlett's essay is a must read. Go read it.

November 26, 2012

Bob Shrum does a superb job of reflecting on the "party that doesn’t comprehend or simply can’t respond to the dimensions of its 2012 defeat." Because of its base.

That's the GOP's arch and possibly insurmountable difficulty--not ideology, not future demographics, not abortion or contraception or gay marriage, not turnout, not Mitt Romney, not not not. This is no negative problem for the GOP. Its problem, rather, is that of a weird positive kind--its base. It is killing the party. It is ignorant and intransigent and wholly out of touch. It is an all-but-certain dead end, yet it's also the only asset the party has left. If the party's leaders abandon the base then there is no GOP; yet if the party's leaders pamper the base then there is, in time, no GOP.

Some organisms just die. Nothing can be done. It's almost miraculous that the Democratic Party, which is, quite literally, the oldest political party in the world, has lasted as long as it has. It has survived and prospered, however, by making necessary adjustments at critical junctures--by ceasing rebellious jabber, by being urban-machine responsive and immigrant-welcoming, by realigning in the 1930s against capitalism's harsher realities, by promoting the cause of human rights for all Americans in the 1960s and beyond.

Republicans, though, have entrenched, not adjusted. They've become a regional party of the Old South and fittingly they've all the Old South's deadly faults: they're insular, they're nativist, they're inflexible, they're paranoid, and they're kinda in-bred stupid. If they are capable of changing, it might nonetheless just be too late.

Elections may come, politicians may go, shifting coalitions may reign and subtle realignments may prevail, but the percentage of dumb-ass Americans seems remarkably stable:

Forty-five percent surveyed in a new CNN/ORC poll said they would blame congressional Republicans if there is no [fiscal cliff-averting] agreement, with 34 percent pointing the finger at Obama [italics mine].

... at Obama. Why? For what?

It matters not. Because about one-third of the American electorate can always be counted on to be utterly, absolutely, breathtakingly wrong about pretty much everything.

I recall an early 1993 poll which revealed that about, oh, 34 percent of Americans disapproved of the job being done by newly inaugurated Vice President Al Gore. Poor Al couldn't yet even find his office each morning without assistance--not to mention that few vice presidents had had much to do once they got there--and already a third of the electorate was agin 'im. Unflinchingly.

There is a technical term for this 34 percent. It's called the Republican base.